In litigation, a party may have an obligation to produce certain categories of documents in response to a subpoena or document request. The producing party produces documents together with a document production log and a privilege log. A production log contains among others brief description about each produced document, a privilege log contains among others a brief description of each document withhold. The party may also create a hot document log that contains a brief description of each important document. Document logs are similar to production logs used in manufacture and service industries. One example is a production log, which contains date, location, personal, equipment and notes. While logs may contain different substances and are used in different fields, they all share five common features: reviewing documents or objects, collecting data, entering data into the log, validating data, and editing log entries. When a log contains millions of entries, its production costs are often prohibitory and data accuracy is hard to control. Any improvements in any of those aspects can improve accuracy and reduce production costs.
Logs are widely used in legal fields. The producing party generally has the right to withhold the documents that are protected under various privilege doctrines. When the producing party is a large organization, the party might have millions of documents, a considerable number of which might have been toughed by in-house attorneys and outside attorneys. The task of processing a large log is labor-intensive. Moreover, it is often very difficult to determine privileged documents because it is difficult to determine whether any of senders and recipients is attorneys. Many documents may have no proper authors. It is important to build a complete list of attorney names and firm names. This is often an impossible task. There are several reasons for this. Companies do not keep track of their in-house counsel names for this purpose while its own staff is routinely changed. Moreover, companies also hire different outside law firms at different times. They do not keep track law firms and outside attorneys. Finally, company's management team may be changed in as short as one or two years. The legal staff that knows company litigation histories may be changed routinely. Thus, identification of in-house counsel and outside counsel is not always feasible.
In a typical document review, one critical task is to build a comprehensive list of attorney names to assist the reviewers in determining privileged documents. Law firms have used several methods to achieve this. They might ask all reviewers to keep a note of the attorney names whenever they encounter from reviewing documents and provide this note to the management staff on a periodical basis so that the manager can add newly discovered attorney names to the growing list. The manager then distributes the updated name list to all reviewers periodically. A problem with this method is that the initial list is very incomplete and updating to the list is untimely. Thus, it increases the risk that some reviewers may be unable to identify certain privileged documents as a result of incomplete and outdated attorney name list.
Many attempts have been made to improve the name list. Law firms may get a comprehensive name list by using a prior document review in another matter for the same party. If the client has never produced documents from the document pool before or has never been involved in any litigation, the only possible way of building the list is to use a task-force team to hunt for attorney names and build a name list. This will increase additional costs.
Another improvement is to use the search capacity for the document review platform to mark up potentially privileged documents. Many document review platform vendors have developed sophisticated technology for identifying potentially privileged documents. Documents are marked as potentially privileged if they contain search terms that consist of not only attorney names but also other words and phrases. For example, the search terms may include a list of terms such as “legal team” “legal advice”, “liability”, “remedy,” and “settlement”. The number of the potential terms can be very large. The search terms may also include transaction-specific terms. If a company has done a prior criminal investigation in code names, the search terms should include those code names. The long search terms are used in conjunction of different search logics. The review platform highlights those terms in the documents, and marks them as potentially privileged in the document log or privilege log. A common problem is that an excessively large number of non-privileged documents are marked as potentially privileged with a large number of highlighted terms in the documents, and still miss critical documents. For example, if a search term happens to appear in a certain type of documents, the system will get all those documents. The system might get all documents from Lawson because one search term is “law.” When the search terms contain hundreds of words and phrases, it may get most of the documents for various unexpected reasons. Such a method can be used to help reviewers confirm privileged documents and, with less confidence, exclude non-privileged documents. Whether the reviewers can treat unmarked documents as non-privileged depend upon the scope of search terms, the search algorithm, the authors' ways of expression, and the type and nature of documents.
In a typical privilege review, one main task is to produce a privilege log, which contains basic information about the document. Privilege review is often combined with responsiveness review. Since a review system has the basic information such as authors, document title, dates, and recipients, it can readily produce most of data fields for the privilege log. The only things to be filled are privilege basis and a description of the document. The privilege basis field may be filled with the options of attorney-client privilege, work product, joint-defense privilege, and supervisory privilege. Filling the description field is the most difficult task in privilege review. If it contains too much detail, it would allow the opposing party to get some privileged information. If it contains too little information, the opposing party may be unable to determine whether the document is in fact privileged. In practice, the level of disclosure in description depends upon the nature of cases and opposing parties. For highly contested cases such as class actions, a detailed description is required to avoid court challenges. In contrast, for cases like mergers and government investigations, a brief description by using a few simple language patterns will be sufficient.
In the last two decades, little improvement has made to increase the efficiency and performance. Any improvement must not restraint the judgment of litigation attorneys. This invention is intended to provide an improved log production environment without affecting the attorneys judgment. The method and system can substantially improve data consistency and reduce the production costs.